Psychological Reactions to Esperanto

The following paper by Claude Piron first appeared in the French-language series Documents sur l'espéranto in the mid-1980s. The present translation by William Auld was published in the English-language series in 1995.

1. Differing reactions

To a psychologist investigating reactions to the word
"Esperanto" two facts are immediately apparent:
a high percentage of those invited to give their opinion
have a great deal to say about it; and they regard
as self-evident, and in many cases cite without prompting,
various statements which are contrary to verifiable
reality, for example: "no one has ever written
a novel straight into Esperanto", "Esperanto
is a language no one speaks", "there are
no children who have it as the mother tongue",
etc. Such convictions are well illustrated by a reader's
letter in Time magazine from Peter Wells of Singapore:

Esperanto has no cultural history, no indigenous literature
and no monolinguals or even first-language speakers.
(Wells, 1987).

In addition, many of those questioned display every
sign of emotional involvement. Some react enthusiastically,
fervently. But the majority are patronising towards
Esperanto, as though it were obviously childish. The
person concerned makes it clear that Esperanto is not
to be taken seriously, and his tone is disdainful,
ironic or humourously condescending towards the "simple
souls" who take it up.

If, in order to get a control reaction for comparison,
the researcher asks the subject to give his or her
opinion about Bulgarian or Indonesian in the same way,
he gets quite a different response. The subject takes
about a minute to recount in a perfectly neutral tone
of voice everything he has to say about them, usually
that he knows nothing.

The contrast is astonishing. It is seen to be all the
more remarkable when his knowledge is tested by precise
questions about literature, geographical distribution,
subtlety of expression, etc. At once it becomes apparent
that the subject's impressions about Esperanto are
almost wholly erroneous, much more so than the tiny
scraps of knowledge he can drag up concerning the control
languages. Why is he aware of his incompetence in the
one case and not in the other?

Presumably languages such as Bulgarian and Indonesian
are seen as belonging to the realm of facts, while
Esperanto is felt to be a proposal. Facts are bowed
down to. Faced with a proposal, it is felt necessary
to give a yes or a no and then defend that point of
view. But why is Esperanto not seen as belonging to
the realm of facts? And why does the reaction, so frequently,
become so emotional? This involvement of the emotional
range is not restricted to individual conversations,
as witness the following quotation taken from an article
on the teaching of Latin, an article otherwise expressed
in a neutral and informative tone:

[Long live Latin, then, and down with Esperanto, that
hotchpotch stinking of artificiality and hopes betrayed!]

That sentence, unrelated to the remainder of the text,
seems like an emotional eruption unexpectedly boiling
up out of who knows what kind of depths. Why should
this be?

2. Defence mechanisms

Analysed, the kind of statements about Esperanto or
the wider field of international communication which
can easily be obtained by inviting people to speak
freely on the subject, or are put forward at official
meetings devoted to this question, are found to be
characterised by the action of the so-called "defence
mechanisms". This is the name given to tactics
unconsciously organised to avoid facing up to a reality
felt to be threatening (Freud, Anna, 1937). Here are
some examples:

(a) Denial. Esperanto is treated as non-existent in
situations where it would be logical to take it into
account. For example the volume Le Langage in the encyclopedic
series La Pléiade (Martinet, 1968) which, in
1525 pages dealing with everything from slang and pidgin
to translation and aphasia, contains no mention, not
even a single paragraph, of the amazing phenomenon
that a language known to only one person a hundred
years ago is in use today in over a hundred countries.
Similarly, the experience built up of Esperanto as
a conference language is considerable; in 1986 there
wasn't a single day during which there wasn't, somewhere
in the world, a congress, a meeting or an international
conference, at which Esperanto was the working language
(a list appeared in Heroldo de Esperanto of 20th March
1986). When the UN, for example, is making a detailed
analysis of the problems encountered in linguistic
communication, it would be reasonable to consider this
experience, if only to reject it, after examination,
on explicit grounds. But this is not what happens.
(King et al, 1977; Allen et al, 1980; Piron, 1980).

Even a linguist considering precisely the kind of communication
daily realised through Esperanto approaches the question
as if that experience had never happened:

While economists are exercised in creating a Eurodollar,
why should we not try for a Eurolanguage too? (Lord,
1974, p. 40).

An industrialist's first reaction when confronted by
a production problem is to consider all the solutions
applied elsewhere, in order to find out, before looking
for a new way out, whether there isn't a system somewhere
that would suit him. This way of going about things,
so natural in daily life, is practically never adopted
where international communication is concerned. We
are in fact faced here with a denial of reality, in
the psychological sense.

(b) Projection. The fact of attributing to someone else
psychic elements to be found in ourselves is known
as projection. A good example is provided by the sentence:

Efforts to devise universal languages which could be adopted without prejudice and learned without trouble - languages like Esperanto - represent a noble intent combined with an essential ignorance of what language is and how it works. (Laird, 1957, p. 236).

Esperanto satisfies all the criteria linguistically
accepted for defining a language (Martinet, 1967, p.
20). When an author, without checking and without basing
his opinion on factual arguments, starts from the principle
that this is untrue, is he not the very ignoramus he
facilely sees others as? [On "how it works",
see the article "L'esperanto, una lingua che funziona"
by the Italian linguist Alessandro Bausani (1981)].

Traits making it out to be some kind of monstrous mutation
are frequently attributed to Esperanto. This is how
an American language teacher describes such a language
(the text is a translation of a translation, as the
original is not to hand):

A language, like love and the soul, is something that is human and alive, however difficult it is to define: it is a natural product of the spirit of an entire race, not of a single individual Ú Artificial languages are repulsive and grotesque, like people with a metal arm or leg, or with a pacemaker attached to their heart. Dr Zamenhof, like Dr Frankenstein, created a monster out of living bits and pieces, and, as Mary Shelley tried to tell us, nothing good can come out of that. (Arbaiza, 1975, p. 183).

Such judgements are activated by unconscious fears and
imaginings which are projected on to the language:
instead of being studied as a linguistic, literary,
social or psychological reality, it is treated like
some kind of dream figure motivated by malicious intentions,
with no perception of how delirious, in the psychiatric
meaning of the word, such an attitude is.

(c) Rationalisation. Irrational viewpoints are justified
by means of abundant convincing arguments. In other
words, as in the classic paranoid speech pattern, the
intellectual arguments are strictly logical. Only the
lack of a basis in reality betrays its essential fantasy.

For example, to Esperanto is attributed an Indo-European
inflected analytical character, which is explained
by the fact that Zamenhof, so they say, only knew Indo-European
languages. But none of these assertions was checked.
In actual fact,

An important place among Esperanto's traits is occupied
by its multicultural substratum, in which the Asiatic
and Hungarian contributions have played no small part
(literary activity in the Esperanto language between
the two world wars developed to a great extent in a
Hungarian ambience, the so-called Budapest School;
Hungarian is not Indo-European).

Zamenhof knew a non-Indo-European language well: Hebrew,
and his creation bears its stamp; for example, the
semantic field of the morpheme _ig has an exact equivalent,
among the languages he knew, only in the Hebrew hif'il
(Piron, 1984, p. 26).

Esperanto acts agglutinatively, not inflectionally.
Statements in it can as easily be synthetic as analytic
- it is just as acceptable to say mi biciklos urben
as mi iros al la urbo per biciklo; textual research
shows that synthetic forms are very frequent - and
if it is true that phonetically and lexically it is
Indo-European, it assuredly is not so structurally:
no Indo-European language consists, as it does, of
strictly unalterable morphemes.

(d) Isolation. Isolation is the name given to the act
of separating something from its context and making
unrelated judgements about it. When someone says, of
languages:

[It happens, too, that languages are born, but never
out of nothing: Esperanto is a fiasco],

He is isolating the international language from its
context, historical as well as linguistic. In fact,
Esperanto's place is in a long chain of experiments
and meditations extending over several centuries. In
Zamenhof's work its genesis was gradual, in many respects
similar to linguistic evolution, just as the genesis
of an embryo evokes that of the species; its gradual
development is worth studying (Waringhien, 1959, pp.
19-49). On the other hand, the morphemes of which it
consists have their roots in other languages; they
are not elements "created out of nothing".

Esperanto was no more born out of nothing than was the
Creole of Haiti. A language appears in response to
a need. Among the slaves of various races in the Caribbean
whose languages were reciprocally incomprehensible,
there was a need to communicate with each other; out
of this need was born a colourful language based largely
on that of their white owners but structurally quite
different. In the same way, between 1880 and 1910 a
part of the world's population was longing to make
contacts abroad and thirsted after a widening of cultural
horizons, but found language learning impossible in
their circumstances. These people seized on Zamenhof's
project, and by using it transformed it into a fully
living language. Neither Creole nor Esperanto was born
from nothing; they were born of the same socio-psychological
force: the desire to converse.

[Take a bird, perhaps one of our lake swans, pluck it
completely, gouge out its eyes, replace its flat beak
with a vulture's or an eagle's, graft on to its leg-stumps
the feet of a stork, stuff an owl's eyeballs into the
sockets (...); now indite your banners, propagate and
shout the following words: "Behold the universal
bird", and you will get a slight idea of the icy
feeling created in us by that terrible butchery, that
most sickening vivisection, increasingly offered to
us under the name of Esperanto or universal language.]

Setting aside the picturesque (and ornithological) aspect
of that quotation, and the words which reveal the extent
of emotional reaction ("terrible butchery",
"most sickening vivisection"), only two criticisms
remain:

(a) Esperanto results from human intervention in something living;

(b) it is a heterogeneous language.

The above author's conclusion is rational only on three
conditions:

that language is a living being, like an animal;

that human intervention in something living is invariably deleterious;

that a heterogeneous language is unsuitable for communication.

Mesmerised by his nightmarish vision, the author isolates
his vision from such considerations. He fails to see
that likening a language to a living entity is no more
than a metaphor that mustn't be taken too far. The
bird he mentions would have suffered, terribly, but
when Dutch spelling was reformed in the forties the
language didn't cry out or need an anaesthetic.

Secondly, man often intervenes in living things with
excellent results. Famine would be much more dramatic
in India if new types of grain had not been successfully
produced thanks to man's wholly conscious intervention
in nature. And neither dogs nor roses nor bread would
exist if man had not intentionally applied his talents
to living things.

Thirdly, if heterogeneity were damning, English could
not function satisfactorily. Linguistic analysis shows
it to be more heterogeneous than Esperanto:

When we come to a language like English, we find ourselves dealing with several languages rolled into one. (Lord, 1974, p. 73).

Esperanto is more homogeneous because its laws governing
the elements absorbed from other sources are stricter.
What defines the heterogeneity of something assembled
is not the diversity of origin of the ingredients,
but some lack of harmony together with the lack of
an assimilating nucleus (as everyone knows who has
tried to prepare Ú mayonnaise).

3.Underlying anxiety

The function of the defence mechanisms is to protect
the ego from anxiety. Their appearance whenever Esperanto
is mentioned means that deep in the psyche the language
is felt to be threatening.

(a) Avoiding change in the status quo. In some respects
psychological resistance to Esperanto can be compared
with the opposition encountered by the ideas of Christopher
Columbus and Galileo: a stable, well-ordered world
found itself overturned by the new theories, which
deprived humanity of its millennially firm foundation.
In the same way, Esperanto is seen as troublesome in
a world where every people has its own language, and
where this tool is passed on en masse from one's ancestors
and no individual is entitled to violate it. It demonstrates
that a language is not necessarily the gift of past
centuries, but may result from simple convention. Taking
as its criterion of correctness not conformity with
authority, but effectiveness of communication, it changes
the way of interrelating: where previously there was
a vertical axis, it replaces it with a horizontal axis.
Thus it attacks many profound matters on which light
is not accustomed to be thrown. For example, what happens
to the language hierarchy because of it? Irish Gaelic,
Dutch, French and English are not seen as equal in
people's minds or in many official texts. If people
of different languages used Esperanto to communicate
with one another, this hierarchy would lose its basis.

(b) Language as a cared value and a sign of identity.
A language is not just an external social phenomenon.
It is woven into our personality. "I absorbed
Catalan with my mother's milk", said one person
questioned in the course of the research on which this
analysis is based.

Our concepts carry an emotional charge which linguistics
ignores but which is vital to our conduct. The sentimental
nucleus of the concept "language" is sited
in the relationship with the mother, which is presumably
why many ethnic tongues speak of the family language
as the "mother" tongue. Between the baby
who can only express its unhappiness by crying, and
often gets an unsuitable or unhelpful response, and
the three-year-old infant who uses words to explain
what has happened, an enormous change has taken place,
which to the infant seems miraculous.

We were too young when we learned to talk to be aware
that it was just an everyday learning process that
was taking place. It seemed to us a kind of magical
gift, a divine toy. Previously we couldn't explain
anything, and here, we know not why, we find ourselves
in possession of a talisman that fulfils all kinds
of miracles and enriches to an unprecedented extent
the thing without which life would be impossible: personal
relationships.

The need to feel understood is one of a child's basic
requirements. Well, without language what would remain?
Parental attitudes, followed by the lengthy influence
of the school, which presents the language as something
unassailable and the key to all literary treasures,
only strengthens the sentimental nucleus. To assert
in this context that a language "made up"
by someone seen as a contemporary - Esperanto is generally
confused with Zamenhof's project - can function as
well as one's native tongue is an insult to the latter,
is to take away the status as a magical talisman that
it always retains in the depths of the psyche even
if at a conscious level we look on it more rationally.
It is an intolerable sacrilege. It's presumably to
avoid such desecration that some Esperanto speakers,
by a quite understandable psychological transference,
say that Zamenhof's work is by itself inexplicable
and is to be attributed to inspiration from on high,
superhuman.

In fact, when the psychological reactions evoked by
the word "Esperanto" are examined, one can
only be amazed at the number of people unable to tolerate
the idea that this language could be, in some respects,
better than their native tongue. This reaction comes
from a tendency to equate a language with the person:
my language is my people, my language is me; if my
language is inferior my people is inferior, and I am
inferior. By declaring Esperanto a priori worthless,
and pronouncing this judgement as self-evident, one
is saved. This artifice is profoundly human and perfectly
understandable, but not acceptable from a scientific
point of view.

(c) Various fears. When reactions to Esperanto are examined
by means of clinical discourse, all kinds of underlying
fears are revealed, which cannot be discussed in detail.
I shall simply limit myself to seven:

(i) Fear of risk. Since no official body, no prestigious
institution, has acknowleged Esperanto's value, to
come out in favour of it is to adopt a stance that
is distanced from the one which appears to be official.
It's less risky to regurgitate what everyone else says,
which seems to be in line with the attitude of those
in authority and the intellectual elite.

(ii) Fear of direct contacts. There is something reassuring
about communicating by means of translation or a language
too imperfectly understood to enable a direct exchange
of ideas in detail and with subtlety. Meeting, in conditions
of perfectly untrammelled communication, with attitudes
radically different from our own, can be a shocking
and dangerously confusing experience. This fear is
justified, because Esperanto exists in our midst at
a level closer to spontaneous expression than other
languages. A young Japanese who went round the world
meeting at every stage local Esperanto speakers tells
us how shocked he was by these straight dialogues with
people who, just because they were being themselves
and were able to say so, altered the ethnic perspective
of the world-view (Deguti, 1973).

(iii) Fear of infantile regression. "Simple"
is confused with "over-simple" or "childish",
which gives rise to the notion that Esperanto cannot
be used to express really adult thoughts at the highest
level of abstraction. Thus the factor of "simplicity"
is isolated from its complement - which totally modifies
the situation - i.e. unlimited possibilities of combination.
For example, the ending _a, which signifies an adjective
in Esperanto, is much simpler than the many French
suffixes fulfilling the same role, but it frequently
makes exact expression possible, whereas many French
nouns do not have an adjectival form, e.g. insécurité
(English insecure, Esperanto nesekura), fait (English
factual, Esperanto fakta), Etats-Unis (Spanish estadounidense,
Esperanto usona, which Esperanto differentiates from
amerika kaj nordamerika), or pays (besides nacia, "of
the nation", Esperanto has landa, "of the
country"), and so on.

(iv) Fear of transparency. It is imagined that Esperanto
would endow thought with an intolerable clarity:

[It is difficult to see a place for the affective aspect,
so important in language, in that clear language in
which everything is explicit, that language "more
exact than thought".]

It is in fact just as possible to be inexact in Esperanto
as in any other language, even if it is often easier
to speak clearly in Zamenhof's tongue.

(v) Fear of inferiority in connection with facility.
A more complicated solution to a problem is felt to
be worth more than a simple one. Choosing the difficult
one satisfies some kind of wish to dominate which provides
a reassuring and comforting feeling of one's own importance.

(vi) Fear of heterogeneity. This is a special form of
the condition known classically as "fragmentation
anxiety". Because it is easy for man to identify
with a language, Esperanto encourages projection on
to it of emotions connected with the whole of the personality.
Now, this is felt at the unconscious level to be a
fragile structure made up of separate self-contradictory
elements continually in danger of falling apart. As
a symbol of something insufficiently strong, being
constructed of too disparate elements, Esperanto is
frightening.

(vii) Fear of lowering standards and destruction. Esperanto
is perceived as a road-roller whose passing squashes
everything to death, flattening out all cultural differences.
In this way, psychic elements belonging either to what
Freud called the death-wish or to the unconscious affective
nucleus called "automaton" by Charles Baudouin
are projected on to Zamenhof's language. (Baudouin,
1950, pp. 225-229).

4.Conclusion: the function of psychological resistance

The reason for the emotional reactions noted at the
start of this study is now becoming clearer: the person
concerned is afraid. He is terrified of the idea that
the sacred treasure that shines with a fairy beauty
in the depths of his psyche, which nothing is allowed
to surpass: the mother tongue, symbol of his identity,
might be torn away or damaged. Like a bird in a room,
which, panic-stricken, doesn't stop beating itself
against the windowpane and doesn't see the open door
nearby, he lacks the serenity necessary for a quiet
look at what, after all, Esperanto is, that appears
to defile the very concept of a language. He is caught
up in a vicious circle: to stop being frightened he
would have to look at the reality straight on, but
to do that he must first stop being frightened.

This kind of reaction, illogical but typical in human
psychology, doesn't happen without the intervention
of political and social factors blown up and spread
by the mass media, but which cannot be analysed here
(I have dealt with them elsewhere, vd. Piron, 1986,
pp. 22-28 and 34-36). They suggest a subliminal influence
comparable with those of advertising and political
propaganda, based on involuntary misinformation that
has been reproducing itself automatically for a century
now. There is no other way of explaining why it is
that children and adolescents almost never show the
a priori negative reaction easily found in adults,
although all the psychological elements triggering
defence mechanisms in the latter are present in the
former as well.

Manipulated by his unconscious fears, twentieth-century
man doesn't see that before passing judgement on Esperanto
it is necessary to take cognisance of a number of facts.
This may be regrettable. But from a historic point
of view it can be seen that these reactions have had
a positive effect. The instant general acceptance
of the language embryo put together by Zamenhof would
have subjected it to stresses from which it would not
have emerged alive. At that stage it was too delicate,
too incomplete. It needed quite a long lifetime in
a limited but multicultural environment for the necessary
adjustments to be brought about, for semantic areas
to be defined, for weaknesses to be corrected naturally,
through usage.

On the other hand, linguistic relationships are always
relationships of the strong towards the weak. The idea
of replacing these by egalitarian relationships affording
the same status to the smallest and weakest language
as to those of the economic and cultural giants has
been too shocking for humanity to be able to adjust
unscathedly and quickly to it. Transformations in the
general thought patterns require gradual assimilation.

From a century of challenges, of political and intellectual
attacks, Esperanto has emerged remarkably strong, flexible,
refined. It is characterised by a firmly stamped personality,
as vigorous as French was in Rabelais' day. This fact
is still denied by most people, but always a priori.
When a writer bases himself on the examination of documents
or observation of Esperanto in practical use, he acknowledges
its enormous vitality. While the social and psychological
resistance to Esperanto has been very strong for a
long time, nowadays it seems to be more and more breathless
and relinquishing its triumphant superiority. Is this
not simply because it has ceased to fulfil a function?